CoolDash – Blank Magento extension for building admin system configuration area

In order to speed things up with building admin sections under System > Configuration area in Magento I wrote a little blank extension. Hopefully its a step or two beyond “Hello world” level. I named the extension “CoolDash”, short from CoolDashboard. Name holds no special meaning, just something I popped out of my head. First thing you might notice when you open config.xmls and system.xml is the attribute naming. I intentionally used names like “somecooldashmodel2”. I found it extremely difficult, error prone and annoying to get around in scenarios where different areas of config files use same names for attributes with different meaning, like “customer”, “catalog” and so on.

Hopefully my “funny” naming scheme in config files will give you a better overview on where everything goes. Below are few screenshots to see the result.

Download ActiveCodeline_CoolDash.Blank extension for building “System > Configuration” area of Magento admin interface. Although built on Magento 1.4alpha, should work on Magento 1.3.

Could you explain how to add menu items to the Magento admin’s main navigation? It seems to me this process has changed in version 1.4, as normally you would place a node like … in your module’s config.xml file, but this no longer seems to work in 1.4

This is a amazing. I have to say, I have created a dummy module to use whenever I need to create a new module. But I did not know how to setup a module to be able to view configuration on the admin side. This is great.

Hey Branko, nice work – thanks for sharing this. I agree that it can be a pain setting up the skeleton modules in Magento, so anything that automates the process slightly is great! It’s also very easy to not bother writing an admin module to interface with the config for a custom module, and instead obting to just hard code default values in your config.xml, so this will make me shift from doing that 🙂

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